1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image pickup apparatus and, more particularly, to an image pickup apparatus such as a digital still camera having a display which is used for displaying a stored photography image or serves as a viewfinder, a digital still camera having a data communication function, or a digital still camera having a function of deleting the stored photography image.
2. Related Background Art
In a conventional digital still camera for electrically photographing a still image, an output signal from an image pickup element is compressed and encoded every time a release button is depressed. The resultant image files are sequentially stored in a nonvolatile memory 24.
When continuous photography is performed with the conventional digital still camera, the image files of all the photography images are stored in the nonvolatile memory. When the user then checks the photographed images on a display such as an LCD and finds failed or undesired unnecessary images, he must delete these image files from the nonvolatile memory using an image deletion function, thus requiring the user a cumbersome operation. Excessive write and delete operations are performed for the nonvolatile memory whose total write count is limited.
A display provided in a conventional digital still camera is often compact and has a low resolution when deleting an image is performed. The image displayed on the display has a large difference from the corresponding image represented by the actual data. Therefore, even if an image is properly displayed on the color liquid crystal monitor, unsuccessful photography such as exposure errors and vibration cannot be often noticed until the data is transferred to a device such as a personal computer.
The above-mentioned method of deleting the image cannot be practiced in an optical finder-type digital still camera having no color liquid crystal monitor. The images must be deleted while checking the images after the corresponding data are transferred to the personal computer or the like.